China in World History

This slim volume, with a main text of just eighty-one pages, has a big purpose. Its goal is to reframe for students the way we look at Chinese history by highlighting the recurring impact that foreign peoples had on China’s early historical development. In this, it joins a number of other works that have taken aim at the long-lived cliché of China as an insular civilization. These include Joanna Waley-Cohen’s Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (1999) and Valerie Hansen’s The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (2000). While Hansen ends her account in the late Ming period and Waley-Cohen takes the story to the end of the twentieth century, Tansen Sen and Victor H. Mair stop with the last of Zheng He’s voyages in the early fifteenth century. In doing so, they emphasize the earlier manifestations of China’s interaction with other civilizations.

To make their point, Sen and Mair divide the book into five chapters. The first chapter sets the stage by describing early Chinese accounts of foreigners. Each of the remaining chapters is devoted to a specific period and focuses on a particular manifestation of Sino-foreign contact characteristic of that time. Chapter 2 addresses the period through the Bronze Age dynasties and emphasizes the Mesopotamian and Central Asian origins of bronze metallurgy and chariot technology. Chapter 3 traces the story of foreign contact by moving forward to the Han period and examining the development of the various trading routes conventionally referred to as the Silk Road that connected the Chinese empire with Western states. Recognizing its cultural impact, they devote the fourth chapter to the arrival and spread of Buddhism in China. The central thread of this chapter is the complicated way that Chinese assumptions of cultural superiority interacted with recognition of India as a pilgrimage site while China gradually emerged as a Buddhist center in its own right. The final substantive chapter focuses on the “age of commerce,” taking the story from the mid-eighth to the early fifteenth century. Besides these substantive chapters, Sen and Mair provide useful supplementary material: a chronology that includes highlights of Chinese and world history; a glossary of important terms; and an appendix with translations of three representative texts that contain Chinese views of different cultural regions (an excerpt dealing with the Xiongnu from the Shiji, a passage from Faxian’s record of his pilgrimage to India, and a description of Mecca by a Chinese Muslim who accompanied Zheng on his voyages). For its length, the book also contains a significant number of illustrations, including maps and photographs of representative material objects.

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Tansen Sen, Victor H. Mair. Traditional China in Asian and World History. Key Issues in Asian Studies Series. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2012. Illustrations. 113 pp. $10.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-924304-65-1.

Reviewed by Anthony DeBlasi (University at Albany)
Published on H-Asia (May, 2013)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Aurélia Martin

Chargée de communications et des médias pour l'UMR Chine Corée Japon (CNRS)

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